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> But it was an anomalous miracle that was confined to a select few Westerners, for a very short time span.

You say that, but the US per capita GDP, adjusted for inflation and PPP and anything else you care to throw at it, has only increased since then, and not by a small amount.

Are we sure per capita GDP is the measure we want to use, though? Doesn't that just take the overall GDP and divide by population?

When I look at median income over time versus per capita GDP over time, adjusting both for inflation, they're both increasing, but they're also diverging because the bulk of the gains are concentrated at the top.

That is as big a reason people are having a hard time making ends meat nowadays as anything. Unfortunately, fixing that trend will require reversing most of the tax code changes made in the last half century and a lot of aggressive anti trust action - i.e., breaking up markets allowed to consolidate too much.

I don't see any of that happening without a clean sweep of DC, though.

> Are we sure per capita GDP is the measure we want to use, though?

Oh I completely agree that GDP is a terrible measure of prosperity (and even median income is lacking, as you noticed). But I was not using it to measure individual/median prosperity, but the overall material wealth of the country, to debunk the assertion that a single teacher's salary could comfortably sustain a family then only because of a unique, brief set of circumstances that materially enriched the US.

We always have to be careful with per capita averages. If one billionaire increased his prosperity by $10B, and the other 400 million people decreased theirs by $10 each, we would say the country's average prosperity increased.

Sure, but the material demand on almost everything is now driven by 3B people across the east of asia, no longer just the 1B or so people in the anglosphere/western Europe.

Does that explain anything? Wouldn't it make the inflation/PPP-adjusted per-capita GDP lower, since those take into account prices growth from increased demand?

Are you arguing that the larger market should make things cheaper?

> That concentrated wealth has now been spread to other people around the world,

The world over, the ultra-rich are fleecing the rest of the planet. The wealth of the 0.5% has soared astronomically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

I do agree America had a magic moment after WWII, and that we have an amazing run, and that yes some of this is just a rebalancing. But we are getting absolutely hosed, decade after decade, by half the US Government intent on helping milk every ounce of value & hope they can from the land & it's people. We are getting absolutely hosed the the 0.1%. There's endless political distractions & nonsense spamming the air, and very little attention to where the wealth is really going: yes some of it is going to rising middle classes in other countries. But the wealth of all nations is being captured by a vicious Global Elite E1 Barbarian class, who is engaged in war against everyone else, and who have purchased a huge number of media outlet & have their hands in many government policy-makings to insure their share of the pie only ever goes up.

I do not think that really explains it.

For one thing you are arguing that living standards have fallen in rich countries because the wealth is more spread out. The numbers say that both rich countries and the world as a whole have better off.

It is more about the cost of things that are in limited supply (land, for example) and the distribution of wealth within those countries.

The limited supply is because natural resources (especially oil) are now competed for by a much larger percentage of the world (ie. higher demand). Even the population of the US is much larger, contributing to the same result. The outsized wealth of Americans from a generation or two ago, was a mirage, and an incredible aberration in history; predicated on the exploitation, and relatively unfettered extraction of resources from around the world.

The numbers say (inflation adjusted) per capita GDP is a lot higher in just every developed country than it was a generation or two ago. If inflation was the reason, as you suggest, that would not be the case.

It's almost as if per capita GDP isn't a great measurement of general quality of life.

I never said it had anything to do with inflation. There are a lot of factors, as I said, geopolitics, demographics, emerging technologies and industrialization, etc. But it is ridiculous to think that supply and demand has nothing to do with where we find ourselves. There are certain fixed or constrained resources (land, etc) that more people are competing for today than ever before. The world population has doubled (or more) since the glory days of the USA, if nothing else.

> The limited supply is because natural resources (especially oil) are now competed for by a much larger percentage of the world (ie. higher demand).

Prices are higher because of high demand - i.e. inflation.

> There are certain fixed or constrained resources (land, etc) that more people are competing for today than ever before

That has been true for all of human history. Population has been growing.

What has also been true is that technological advances have easily kept ahead of this for all of human history.

> The world population has doubled (or more) since the glory days of the USA, if nothing else.

The world population is also a lot more productive.

Most of those people used far less energy than we do today. They had less tech, less manufactured goods, smaller houses, etc.

> That concentrated wealth has now been spread to other people around the world, and means that we don't get to live like kings, while the rest of the world lives in squalor.

This is untrue because the rest of the world also produced wealth that the West has a share of - due to being early investors. The West became wealthier when the rest of the world became wealthier.

But, WHO in the West became wealthier? This is the main question. The wealth clearly did not trickle down to the middle class or poors.

From the numbers, is it evident that shareholders became wealthier - especially large shareholders in the West - even when productivity and profits increased, the earnings of workers did not increase proportionately.

To me it seems futile to try to keep coming up with theories when the solution is as simple as higher taxes on the rich and zero taxes for the poor.

I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, poor people can't afford to buy politicians.